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Commentary by Peter Nahum and Sally Burgess

Sir Alfred Gilbert became the leading artist in the vigorous revival of British sculpture . . . in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This generation of sculptors breathed life into the stale neo-Classical teachings of the academic establishment, creating a three dimensional equivalent to the Symbolist paintings of George Frederic Watts and Burne-Jones. Casting an eye back to the traditions of the highly finished bronze sculptures of the Florentine Renaissance, their work is often explicitly symbolic and Sir Alfred Gilbert's own sculptures are intensely personal, conveying ideas and emotions centered on love, death and the spiritual.

Perseus Arming marks the beginning of a cycle of myths and stories in which Sir Alfred Gilbert illustrated the course of his life. Modelled on his return from Florence after having seen Cellini's masterful Perseus and Medusa, in which Perseus triumphantly holds up Medusa's severed head, Gilbert saw beyond the original text, to the imagined incident of Perseus as a mortal, ordinary man, preparing for his epic battle with Medusa. Gilbert explained to Joseph Hatton how: every story has two sides -- the one being the accepted and literal text, and the other that which the text suggests.

The lethargic figure of Perseus, gracefully reaching to fasten his winged sandals, was to Gilbert an allegory of his own circumstances as a budding artist. Gilbert was 'arming' himself, not to face the ferocious snake-headed Medusa, but the daunting group of art critics of the Paris Salon and Royal Academy. As at that time my whole thoughts were of my artistic equipment for the future, I conceived the idea that Perseus before becoming a hero was a mere mortal, and that he had to look to his equipment. That is a presage of my life and work at that time and I think the wing still ill-fits me, the sword is blunt and the armour dull as my own brain.

Gilbert emerged victorious in 1883, when the critics of the Paris Salon praised the first of his autobiographical departures, Perseus Arming. This gave Alfred Gilbert the courage he needed to: continue the task I had set myself -- that was, to go on writing my own history by symbol. Icarus and Comedy and Tragedy were two of the subsequent chapters in this artistic 'autobiography'.

It is not certain who commissioned the first cast of Perseus Arming. According to Edmund Gosse, Sir Henry Doulton had commissioned the piece on his way through Rome in the spring of 1881. Gilbert... had striven and failed, and now, in deep indigence, with a wife and two children to support, had almost come to the very confines of his courage. ... At their first interview, Henry Doullon saw, admired and gave a commission for the statuette by which Mr Gilbert first became generally recognised in London and Paris -- the now well-known 'Perseus'. Mc Allister, on the other hand states that I P. Heseltine acquired the prime cast of Perseus Arming, which may also be correct. The artist Louise Jopling recalls visiting Heseltine's house in the spring of 1883 where she saw, the very first work of that incomparable genius, Gilbert RA -- a small statuette of a nude figure. At this date Perseus Arming is the only possible candidate and it is pertinent that in all early exhibitions it was J. R Heseltine, not Sir Henry Doulton, who lent the cast.

References

Beattie, Susan. The New Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

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